HOUSTON -- Former federal prosecutor and television commentator Barbara Olson was among the 3,000 Americans who died on Sept. 11th, 2001.
She was on board Flight 77 when it plowed into the Pentagon.
Olson grew up in Houston, attended to Waltrip High School and St. Thomas University.
Four days after the attacks, her big brother, David Bracher gave her eulogy at the Pentagon.
What strikes him about the wreckage, even now?
Still some damn smoke coming out. I saw it, he said.
The family keeps an assortment of photos and papers from the tragedy.
They include a copy of The Houston Chronicle, with the headline Hot on Trail of Terror Suspects, dated Sept. 13, 2001. Word of Bin Laden s death came May 1st, 2011.
Like the rest of America, the family had waited and waited for justice. Bracher's son was and still is in the navy.
That's his whole mission, not forgetting because that was his aunt, he felt like our family got robbed of her, he said.
It was personal. On one of Bracher s boats, the crew painted a special message for targets in Afghanistan.
On the missiles --- they were big missiles -- on the side it was From Barbara Olson with love, he said.
Olson had been a federal prosecutor spearheading the Clinton s Travelgate and Filegate investigations. She later became a TV legal analyst and political commentator for CNN and other networks. She had also penned two political best sellers. She was one half of a conservative power couple. Her husband was Ted Olson, then the solicitor general of the U.S.
Her husband told her about the first two attacks, Bracher said.
He was talking to her on the telephone when the plane crashed. She was trying to find out what she could tell the pilot, what he could do, he said.
It is, of course, a day, Ted Olson will never forget. His birthday is 9/11. On one of the worst days in U.S. history, on the day Ted Olson lost his wife, he returned to their home and told Bracher:
I get to go to bed at night, pull back the covers and there's a letter from Barbara. Course it was Happy Birthday letter. It was her apparently expressing her love, he said.
What Brasher knows now is that Bin Laden's death doesn't end America's fight or his own.
Trying to find a little closure, but it doesn t [help]. It really doesn't, he said.
Every year on 9/11 Bracher took out a large ad in the Houston Chronicle honoring his sister, until last year. He thought maybe it was time to stop. Today, he says he has reason to start again.
